Experts believe that artificial intelligence will be better than humans at driving trucks by 2027, working in retail by 2031, writing bestselling books by 2049, and working as surgeons by 2053. But how seriously should we take these predictions?

Katja Grace, lead author of ‘When Will AI Exceed Human Performance?’, thinks we should treat such guesses as only weak evidence. But she also says there might be much better ways to forecast transformative technology, and that anticipating such advances could be one of our most important projects.

Source: How well can we actually predict the future? Katja Grace on why expert opinion isn’t a great guide to AI’s impact and how to do better – 80,000 Hours

Interesting podcast on the challenges of trying to preduct future technological advances. The discussion covers the following topics in some depth:

• A survey of machine learning experts (resulting in one of the most discussed papers of 2017)
• An estimation of brain-equivalent hardware
• Hardware trajectories
• Historical technological discontinuities